Megan Beyer is an award-winning journalist, civic activist, and public diplomacy leader. Appointed by President Joe Biden in 2022 to be Director of Art in Embassies at the U.S. Department of State, she created an art diplomacy for democracy initiative called the Democracy Collection. The project sent artists to Embassies for civic engagements around the globe, launched a democracy-themed student art contest, and created a traveling art exhibition that opened at the Acropolis Museum in Athens. She was also appointed by President Barack Obama as Director of the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities in 2015, where she led the first U.S. Cultural Mission to Cuba in 2016 and guided the transition of the Turnaround Arts art education program to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Serving at the U.S. Embassy in Switzerland from 2009-2014, Mrs. Beyer led public diplomacy efforts and created the Jefferson Forum, a dinner series with high-level bilateral discussions focused on environmental, social, technology, medical, and cultural issues. She founded and chaired the bilateral Sister Republics initiative and led the three-year project to support women's issues. Also advancing gender equality, she serves on the Global Advisory Council of the EDGE Certified Foundation in Zug, Switzerland, the only global certification for workplace gender equality. She co-chairs the Women Building Peace Council for the U.S. Institute of Peace, served on the board of the Wilson Center’s Global Women’s Leadership Initiative, and is the Washington, D.C. Council Lead of the Advisory Council of the Geena Davis Institute for Gender in Media. Among hundreds of speaking engagements, she presented at the White House Summit on Working Families (2013), the United Nations Conference on Women (2013), the Geena Davis Institute for Gender in the Media panel on Women in Film (2014) and moderated a United States Institute of Peace panel discussion on gender roles in the Middle East (2016). Mrs. Beyer has been a host and panelist at PBS; a reporter for Media General’s Channel 8 News and CBS affiliate WTVR in Richmond, Virginia; a regular columnist for Le Matin in Switzerland; and contributed essays to the Mothers Movement Online, Role Reboot, the Alexandria Times, the Hill, and the Huffington Post.